Race, Coca Cola, and the Southern Origins of Drug
Prohibition

Figure 1The story of the origins and early years of Coca- Cola—which
contained small quantities of coca extracts until 1903—helps
illuminate changing southern and national perceptions of
appropriate drug use. 1890s advertisement, courtesy of the
Collections of the Library of Congress.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the U.S. hunger for
narcotics and cocaine was so notorious that one leading
public-health official declared, "We are the drug-habit nation."
Today, Americans lustfully—if schizophrenically—consume huge
quantities of both the illegal "dope" of stoners and street junkies
and the equally profitable products of high-tech bioresearch labs
and multinational pharmaceutical corporations. We are now, as we
were a century ago, a people torn between, as the TV
says, "just say no" and "the miracle of medicine." But what do we
mean by "drugs"? The public imagination struggles mightily to
preserve stark distinctions between the various kinds of "drugs":
heroin, cocaine, cannabis, alcohol, anabolic steroids, nicotine,
caffeine, aspirin, Ritalin, Viagra, Prozac, and OxyContin, to name
but a dozen. The history of drug prohibition, however, shows us
that the difference between a "poison" and a "medicine," between
drugs as scourge or salvation, is not so easily determined. Are
those who become dependent upon drugs victims of a physical
disease, or are they criminals and moral deviants? When do
personal, medical, or recreational decisions become a social
menace? And is it the chemistry or the social status of the
consumer that shapes these attitudes? After more than a century of
the "war on drugs," the historical transformation of drug use in
the United States between the 1890s and 1930s from the free and
largely unknowing use of any drug to the strict regulation and
criminalization of narcotics, cocaine, and cannabis remains largely
misunderstood by the public.

At the root of the drug-prohibition movement in the United
States is race, the driving force behind the first laws
criminalizing drug use, which first appeared as early as the 1870s.
In an era in which African Americans, Asian and Mexican immigrants,
as well as most European immigrants—Jews, Slavs, and Catholic Irish
and Italians—were considered racial others, white racial fears
amplified the sense of public menace posed by drugs and drug users.
The belief of Gilded Age whites that racial difference marked a
biologically determined predisposition to, say, deviousness,
slovenliness, or lustfulness served to supercharge the hazards
posed by Catholic inebriation, black intoxication, or Chinese
addictions. The pleasure of drug taking not only endangered
Protestant morality, but the association of specific drug pleasures
with individual racial groups raised the dire threat of
miscegenation and urban disorder.

The nation's first drug laws had appeared in San Francisco in
the 1870s, unsuccessfully prohibiting whites from patronizing opium
dens in Chinatown lest some white woman should fall into the hands
of the yellow peril. Indeed, the first bans on smoking opium only
applied to whites, as race mixing and not the health of Chinese
immigrants was at issue. Organized nativism, including the Ku Klux
Klan, played a crucial role in pressing for federal alcohol
prohibition in the 1910s, marking the 18th Amendment as a failed
attempt by the waning WASP establishment to curtail
the sinful pleasures of urban Catholics and the immigrant working
classes. One of America's favorite recreational drugs, marijuana,
was banned in the 1930s as a way of criminalizing the tens of
thousands of Mexican migrant farm workers who entered the Southwest
in search of work. These laws have remained persistently
ineffective in curbing America's desire for intoxication and have
instead served to demonize and outlaw entire populations.

In the Jim Crow South, the dynamics of race, gender, and the
growth of a mass consumer culture combined with the reformist
impulses of the Progressive era to wage war on the "Negro cocaine
fiend." The changes in Coca-Cola in this time period illustrate
this point. Marketed exclusively to middle class and professional
whites, Coca-Cola contained a small quantity of coca extracts until
1903. When Coca-Cola was introduced, cocaine was championed...

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